Brandus - Under This Roof: The White House and the Presidency--21 Presidents, 21 Rooms, 21 Inside Stories

An award-winning, independent member of the White House press corps, and its most followed member on Twitter, Paul Brandus founded West Wing Reports in 2009 and provides reports for television, radio, and print outlets around the United States and overseas. A frequent speaker on presidential leadership and history and a columnist for MarketWatch, his career spans network television, Wall Street, and several years in Moscow, where he covered the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath for NBC Radio, National Public Radio, and the Public Radio Internationals Marketplace. He has traveled to fifty-three countries on five continents and has reported from, among other places, Iraq, Chechnya, China, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He is a member of the White House Correspondents Association and a former board member of the Overseas Press Club of America.

When I was eighteen, I took out a piece of paper and made a list of things I wanted to do in my life. Things like skydiving, traveling around the world, and watching every movie that won a Best Picture Academy Award. Check, check, and check. Now another item gets crossed off: writing a book. It was a privilege to write it.

Over the course of my research, I received help from a number of wonderful historians and archivists. Among them were William Bushong, chief historian of the White House Historical Association, who filled in a few holes in my manuscript. C. James Taylor, Editor in Chief of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, patiently answered my questions about John Adams, and Dr. John C. Pinheiro of Michigans Aquinas College did so concerning James K. Polk. Dr. John F. Marszalek, Executive Director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library at Mississippi State University, invited me down for a visit, and I intend to take him up on it. Dr. Eugene Trani of Virginia Commonwealth University knows all there is to know about Warren Harding, and when it comes to Harry Truman, Tammy Williams of the Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri, was terrific. Abigail Malangone of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and Steve Branch and Michael Pinckney of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library also deserve my thanks, as do three archivists at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum: Olivia Anastasiadis, Gregory Cumming, and Jon Fletcher. Jeannie Chen of the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, also deserves my thanks, as do Keith Wallman and Lauren Brancato at Lyons Press, who helped keep the train running on time. Im very appreciative to everyone for their generous and cheerful assistance.

But three people in particular deserve more gratitude than I am capable of expressing here. This book simply would not have happened without my agent, Eric Nelson, who helped turn my ideas into a workable project and went out and found a buyer for it. He has been helpful and supportive every step of the way, and to him I owe my heartfelt and humble thanks. My editor, Jon Sternfeld, who brought his own love of history to the table, was wonderful in making the copy flow smoothly, suggesting better words and phrases, and shaping the overall contours of each chapter. He is truly gifted, and I am deeply appreciative. And saving the best for last, I am particularly grateful to Kathryn, my wife, for her love, support, and patience throughout. She truly is my better halfthank you for helping me to reach higher and to persevere to the end of what has been a sometimes bumpy road.

CHAPTER ONE

The State Dining Room

ON OCTOBER 13, 1800, A MONDAY, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED States, John Adams, climbed into his weather-beaten coach in Quincy, Massachusetts, and headed south.1 It was never easy leaving his beloved farm, but it was moving day; he was traveling to his new home in the capital city of Washington, in the District of Columbia, some 450 miles away. It was a new home in a new city, in a new nation in a new century of extraordinary promise.

There was every reason for optimism, but as his carriage bounced up and down the dirt roads, the president was likely in a gloomy mood. He was up for reelection, and his campaign against what had been a lifelong friend, Virginias Thomas Jefferson, had descended into a mud-splattered brawl, tarred by viciousness and slander on both sides.

Though both towering figures of their time and one-time allies, the foreign policy of President Adams, a member of the Federalist Party, had come under increasing criticism from his own Vice President Jeffersona leader of the Democratic-Republican Party. To tamp down the criticism, Adams signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, giving him, among other things, the power to silence his political opposition. Opponents of the president were fined and/or tossed in jail; many newspapers were shut down. The Jefferson camp framed this all as a blatant attack on the First Amendment and called Adams a mad power monger. Adamss supporters depicted Jefferson as a coward and anti-Christian.

The candidates in those days generally did not campaign, as it was considered beneath the dignity of someone running for so esteemed an office. Such high-mindedness certainly didnt apply to the newspapers, whichSedition Act or notlet loose daily with merciless barrages attacking the other side. The New England statesAdamss home turfwould certainly back him, while Jefferson would do equally well in the South. That left the vast area in between, the middle Atlantic region, up for grabs. But Adams also knew that in May Jeffersons Democratic-Republican Party had won control of the legislature of the nations biggest state, New York, along with its twelve electoral votes. That October, as he watched the autumn countryside roll past on his way to Washington, the president understood that his prospects for reelection were uncertain at best.

But troubled as he was by his shaky political standing, Adams may have been even more preoccupied with personal tragedy. The president had learned two years before that Charles, his second-born son, was an alcoholic, had been cheating on his wife, and was penniless. The revelations were obviously devastating to the president and his wife, Abigail. The first lady maintained hope that her son would recover, but Adams washed his hands in the matter. He painfully renounced Charles and swore to never see him again. He kept that promise, declining to stop as the presidential carriage rolled through East Chester, New York.2 Charles, who was described by his father as a beast,3 would be dead within seven weeks at age thirty.

This was the presidents mind-seta man beset with personal and political problemsas he traveled from his lifelong home to what would be a temporary abode of just four months. From a simple saltbox structure to the grandest home in all the land, known in his day as the Presidents House but to the world today as the White House.

The cornerstone of the mansion that would become the White House had been laid eight years before to the day: Saturday, October 13, 1792. A newspaper report said a polished brass plate was pressed into a layer of wet mortar, which had been spread across a foundation stone. The brass plate was inscribed:

This first stone of the Presidents House was laid the 13th day of October 1792, and in the seventeenth year of the independence of the United States of America.